Short Stories by Chekhov
For thirty years I have been the favourite professor, I have had
splendid comrades, I have enjoyed fame and honour. I have loved, married
from passionate love, have had children. In fact, looking back upon it,
I see my whole life as a fine composition arranged with talent. Now all
that is left to me is not to spoil the end. For that I must die like a
man. If death is really a thing to dread, I must meet it as a teacher, a
man of science, and a citizen of a Christian country ought to meet it,
with courage and untroubled soul. But I am spoiling the end; I am
sinking, I fly to you, I beg for help, and you tell me 'Sink; that is
what you ought to do.'"
But here there comes a ring at the front-door. Katya and I recognize it,
and say:
"It must be Mihail Fyodorovitch."
And a minute later my colleague, the philologist Mihail Fyodorovitch, a
tall, well-built man of fifty, clean-shaven, with thick grey hair and
black eyebrows, walks in. He is a good-natured man and an excellent
comrade. He comes of a fortunate and talented old noble family which has
played a prominent part in the history of literature and enlightenment.
He is himself intelligent, talented, and very highly educated, but has
his oddities. To a certain extent we are all odd and all queer fish, but
in his oddities there is something exceptional, apt to cause anxiety
among his acquaintances. I know a good many people for whom his oddities
completely obscure his good qualities.
Coming in to us, he slowly takes off his gloves and says in his velvety
bass:
"Good-evening. Are you having tea? That's just right. It's diabolically
cold."
Then he sits down to the table, takes a glass, and at once begins
talking. What is most characteristic in his manner of talking is the
continually jesting tone, a sort of mixture of philosophy and drollery
as in Shakespeare's gravediggers. He is always talking about serious
things, but he never speaks seriously. His judgments are always harsh
and railing, but, thanks to his soft, even, jesting tone, the harshness
and abuse do not jar upon the ear, and one soon grows used to them.
Every evening he brings with him five or six anecdotes from the
University, and he usually begins with them when he sits down to table.
"Oh, Lord!" he sighs, twitching his black eyebrows ironically. "What
comic people there are in the world!"
"Well?" asks Katya.
"As I was coming from my lecture this morning I met that old idiot N.
N---- on the stairs.... He was going along as usual, sticking out his chin
like a horse, looking for some one to listen to his grumblings at his
migraine, at his wife, and his students who won't attend his lectures.
'Oh,' I thought, 'he has seen me--I am done for now; it is all up....'"
And so on in the same style. Or he will begin like this:
"I was yesterday at our friend Z. Z----'s public lecture. I wonder how it
is our alma mater--don't speak of it after dark--dare display in public
such noodles and patent dullards as that Z. Z---- Why, he is a European
fool! Upon my word, you could not find another like him all over Europe!
He lectures--can you imagine?--as though he were sucking a sugar-
stick--sue, sue, sue;... he is in a nervous funk; he can hardly decipher
his own manuscript; his poor little thoughts crawl along like a bishop
on a bicycle, and, what's worse, you can never make out what he is
trying to say. The deadly dulness is awful, the very flies expire. It
can only be compared with the boredom in the assembly-hall at the yearly
meeting when the traditional address is read--damn it!"
And at once an abrupt transition:
"Three years ago--Nikolay Stepanovitch here will remember it--I had to
deliver that address. It was hot, stifling, my uniform cut me under the
arms--it was deadly! I read for half an hour, for an hour, for an hour
and a half, for two hours.... 'Come,' I thought; 'thank God, there are
only ten pages left!' And at the end there were four pages that there
was no need to read, and I reckoned to leave them out. 'So there are
only six really,' I thought; 'that is, only six pages left to read.'
But, only fancy, I chanced to glance before me, and, sitting in the
front row, side by side, were a general with a ribbon on his breast and
a bishop. The poor beggars were numb with boredom; they were staring
with their eyes wide open to keep awake, and yet they were trying to put
on an expression of attention and to pretend that they understood what I
was saying and liked it. 'Well,' I thought, 'since you like it you shall
have it! I'll pay you out;' so I just gave them those four pages too."
As is usual with ironical people, when he talks nothing in his face
smiles but his eyes and eyebrows. At such times there is no trace of
hatred or spite in his eyes, but a great deal of humour, and that
peculiar fox-like slyness which is only to be noticed in very observant
people. Since I am speaking about his eyes, I notice another peculiarity
in them. When he takes a glass from Katya, or listens to her speaking,
or looks after her as she goes out of the room for a moment, I notice in
his eyes something gentle, beseeching, pure....
The maid-servant takes away the samovar and puts on the table a large
piece of cheese, some fruit, and a bottle of Crimean champagne--a rather
poor wine of which Katya had grown fond in the Crimea. Mihail
Fyodorovitch takes two packs of cards off the whatnot and begins to play
patience. According to him, some varieties of patience require great
concentration and attention, yet while he lays out the cards he does not
leave off distracting his attention with talk. Katya watches his cards
attentively, and more by gesture than by words helps him in his play.
She drinks no more than a couple of wine-glasses of wine the whole
evening; I drink four glasses, and the rest of the bottle falls to the
share of Mihail Fyodorovitch, who can drink a great deal and never get
drunk.
Over our patience we settle various questions, principally of the higher
order, and what we care for most of all--that is, science and learning--is
more roughly handled than anything.
"Science, thank God, has outlived its day," says Mihail Fyodorovitch
emphatically. "Its song is sung. Yes, indeed. Mankind begins to feel
impelled to replace it by something different. It has grown on the soil
of superstition, been nourished by superstition, and is now just as much
the quintessence of superstition as its defunct granddames, alchemy,
metaphysics, and philosophy. And, after all, what has it given to
mankind? Why, the difference between the learned Europeans and the
Chinese who have no science is trifling, purely external. The Chinese
know nothing of science, but what have they lost thereby?"
"Flies know nothing of science, either," I observe, "but what of that?"
"There is no need to be angry, Nikolay Stepanovitch. I only say this
here between ourselves... I am more careful than you think, and I am not
going to say this in public--God forbid! The superstition exists in the
multitude that the arts and sciences are superior to agriculture,
commerce, superior to handicrafts. Our sect is maintained by that
superstition, and it is not for you and me to destroy it. God forbid!"
After patience the younger generation comes in for a dressing too.
"Our audiences have degenerated," sighs Mihail Fyodorovitch. "Not to
speak of ideals and all the rest of it, if only they were capable of
work and rational thought! In fact, it's a case of 'I look with mournful
eyes on the young men of today.'"
"Yes; they have degenerated horribly," Katya agrees. "Tell me, have you
had one man of distinction among them for the last five or ten years?"
"I don't know how it is with the other professors, but I can't remember
any among mine."
"I have seen in my day many of your students and young scientific men
and many actors--well, I have never once been so fortunate as to meet--I
won't say a hero or a man of talent, but even an interesting man. It's
all the same grey mediocrity, puffed up with self-conceit."
All this talk of degeneration always affects me as though I had
accidentally overheard offensive talk about my own daughter. It offends
me that these charges are wholesale, and rest on such worn-out
commonplaces, on such wordy vapourings as degeneration and absence of
ideals, or on references to the splendours of the past. Every
accusation, even if it is uttered in ladies' society, ought to be
formulated with all possible definiteness, or it is not an accusation,
but idle disparagement, unworthy of decent people.
I am an old man, I have been lecturing for thirty years, but I notice
neither degeneration nor lack of ideals, and I don't find that the
present is worse than the past. My porter Nikolay, whose experience of
this subject has its value, says that the students of today are neither
better nor worse than those of the past.
If I were asked what I don't like in my pupils of today, I should answer
the question, not straight off and not at length, but with sufficient
definiteness. I know their failings, and so have no need to resort to
vague generalities. I don't like their smoking, using spirituous
beverages, marrying late, and often being so irresponsible and careless
that they will let one of their number be starving in their midst while
they neglect to pay their subscriptions to the Students' Aid Society.
They don't know modern languages, and they don't express themselves
correctly in Russian; no longer ago than yesterday my colleague, the
professor of hygiene, complained to me that he had to give twice as many
lectures, because the students had a very poor knowledge of physics and
were utterly ignorant of meteorology. They are readily carried away by
the influence of the last new writers, even when they are not first-
rate, but they take absolutely no interest in classics such as
Shakespeare, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, or Pascal, and this inability
to distinguish the great from the small betrays their ignorance of
practical life more than anything. All difficult questions that have
more or less a social character (for instance the migration question)
they settle by studying monographs on the subject, but not by way of
scientific investigation or experiment, though that method is at their
disposal and is more in keeping with their calling. They gladly become
ward-surgeons, assistants, demonstrators, external teachers, and are
ready to fill such posts until they are forty, though independence, a
sense of freedom and personal initiative, are no less necessary in
science than, for instance, in art or commerce. I have pupils and
listeners, but no successors and helpers, and so I love them and am
touched by them, but am not proud of them. And so on, and so on....
Such shortcomings, however numerous they may be, can only give rise to a
pessimistic or fault-finding temper in a faint-hearted and timid man.
All these failings have a casual, transitory character, and are
completely dependent on conditions of life; in some ten years they will
have disappeared or given place to other fresh defects, which are all
inevitable and will in their turn alarm the faint-hearted. The students'
sins often vex me, but that vexation is nothing in comparison with the
joy I have been experiencing now for the last thirty years when I talk
to my pupils, lecture to them, watch their relations, and compare them
with people not of their circle.
Mihail Fyodorovitch speaks evil of everything. Katya listens, and
neither of them notices into what depths the apparently innocent
diversion of finding fault with their neighbours is gradually drawing
them. They are not conscious how by degrees simple talk passes into
malicious mockery and jeering, and how they are both beginning to drop
into the habits and methods of slander.